Abstract

This thesis concerns the introduction of a Western idea of risk management to a peripheral control system as it examines the unintended consequences of re-embedding Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) in an Egyptian insurance company. It traces how ERM was introduced, constructed, modified, and re-defined over time, causing institutional complexity, heterogenic practices, and identity crisis. It ultimately seeks to understand how a new form of management control was made operable amidst local resistance.
The research involved intensive fieldwork with in-depth interviews, direct observations, and documentation reviews. Drawing on institutional logics and Egypt’s geopolitical ramifications, it illustrates how Risk Based Management Control (RBMC) was introduced by Western agencies, how this new control system caused logics competition, and how some ambiguities in identities consequently developed. It was the emergence of the Arab Spring that negatively reacted to those pressures, resulting in great resistance that was amplified through a clash of civilizations as a proper communal understanding and action after the country’s revolutions, which this work calls a “geopolitical shield”.
This analysis makes three contributions to RBMC and logics. First, it extends the institutional logics debate by illustrating that logics get re-institutionalized by the “place” through its cultural and communal identities that filter logic complexities to different ends. Secondly, it extends the cultural political economy of management accounting by illustrating that management accounting in less developed countries (LDCs) is also an operational manifestation of the geopolitics of locale, location, and place. Finally, it provides an illustrative critique for implementing RBMC systems, which in the West were previously cascaded to operational arenas successfully, as other researchers reported, but in the current case this cascading is disrupted by the geopolitical shield activation. Shield activation at the micro level not only successfully hindered RBMC and its apparatuses but also protected monologic controls from becoming heterogenic.